As long as Obama is in office he will be working–secretly and not-so-secretly to further an anti-Israel, Islamist agenda.
In that spirit, I would submit we need a new question for a new age: what DIDN’T Obama know, and for how long didn’t he know it? And why?
This evening, after a good Kum Nye practice, I had this extremely pleasant sense of emotional omnipotentiality, which felt like magic. All of us live conditioned lives, lives dictated by what we fear and crave, by profit and loss, by honor and dishonor. In large measure, we are defined by and constrained by what we avoid and what we seek.
But behind this, there is the possibility of getting past all that, of feeling like you have simultaneously realized all your life’s dreams.
And I want to be clear: we assume that achievement, or sensation has to precede certain emotions, like pride, or wonder, or the sense of magic, but why? Can we not treat emotions as self originating, if the person is sufficiently skilled enough at “conjuring” them?
No Buddhist gets fully beyond the pain of loss. They don’t want to feel physical pain any more than anyone else does, but their path–when taught properly, and in my view it devolves often into simple masochism or empty ritual–offers an alternative. You can choose between this and that.
Presumably part of the problem is finding a way to create power without something going BOOM.
Well, just daydreaming a bit this morning after my shower, it occurred to me you could build rooms in granite a mile under the surface and just set bombs off. You could attach those chambers to hundreds of escape valves with turbines in them that generate power. These would, in some quantity, dissipate the blast.
You could also fill many underground reservoirs with water (or some other material) that would boil, let off steam in the manner I understand fission reactors do, and also drive turbines.
We likely already have 1 kiloton bombs. We could more or less drop them down a chute, and bang, immediate and sustained power. Since the power output would be in units–since there is no minimum critical mass to start, and no need for cooling rods to stop the reaction–power could in this scenario be fitted to actual needs.
As things stand today, it takes more power to create a wind turbine than it will ever create in its lifetime. Quite literally, even if it does its job well throughout its lifespan, humanity as a whole has lost, even if Obama donor and Federal Reserve Board member GE does a very tidy, very profitable business in the process.
Over some period of time, though, solar might become viable, and in some localized instances wind may make sense too. Both are highly dependent on the environment, though, so some equivalent of a coal or wood fire would be good, in which if the fire is dying down, you just add bricks or logs.
We could have dozens of “kilns” (I will call them), and keep only those occupied for which there is a need. Power output could be scaled real time to power demand.
Who knows? Perhaps even small communities could one day have such arrangements, perhaps even houses, with microton bombs.
I am a staunch opponent of the idea that humans are having a significant, or even measurable, impact on global temperatures as a result of using plentiful and easily deployed fuels. At the same time, I do not oppose efficiency per se, and this might be a step in that direction.
All phrases–all “gestures”, to use a term common in Kum Nye for both physical and emotional movements–mean what our inner reality projects into the universe. This is already in, I guess, Wittgenstein, or perhaps Korszybski, one of whom I believe said that the meaning of a communication is what is understood by the recipient.
But this goes beyond that. Let us posit a universal recipient, an omniscient God, or perhaps merely angels who at our level are functionally omniscient. What are you saying? What would be heard by a Being capable of comprehending the entirety of that “gesture” which is your incarnation in this world, and what you have done with it? This is the question we need to ask when dealing with questions of sin and redemption.
One of my favorite books, although I have not taken it up in some years, is Idries Shah’s “Wisdom of the Idiots”, which is a collection of Sufi teaching stories. I have long felt an emotional affection for, and attachment to, the Sufi Way. It is not to be my way in this life: I am much too far afield culturally. But they offer many useful truths.
One of them is that Sufis hide in many disguises, and that of “profane” can be one of them. It is your inner gesture that matters.
Obama can be attacked on so many fronts I have literally lost count. This, however, is a big one. Put her picture out there. Make it an issue.
I was reading a Tibetan cookbook the other day, and the author spoke of a Tibetan monk she once hosted who insisted on offering a prayer of gratitude. He put a pinch of tea in a cup, and filled it to overflowing with water or tea from the teapot, and said something to the effect that his blessings, too, were overflowing. This is also of course a Bible verse, the only part of which I remember is “my cup runneth over” (we read the King James Bible). I’m pretty sure David said it.
So I do this when I think about it. And I was doing it yesterday when this image suddenly appeared to me of water flowing downward. I exist in a line of spiritual beings, who upstream are vastly superior to me, and it is my job to transmit their knowledge to those downstream from me. People do not become “spiritual” so much as learn to allow spiritual energy to flow through them unimpeded. It is not what I do, but what I am able to allow. An analogy would be with electrical lines: the thicker ones can carry more current.
So a proper blessing is to thank your teachers for their love, and to be granted the wisdom and grace to transmit what you have been granted downstream, in an unbroken chain of spiritual energy. Being me, I have countless ways of saying this, and I think if you really approach it with the proper spirit, some variation is both inevitable and desirable. Robots are not needed. And words are not actually needed either. This is very much a case where what you are looking for is best described when it is seen as THAT.
But I like this image, and thought I would pass it along.
But is it not also possible that those Generals were trying to get their hands on nukes to use for various purposes in the event the American people have to launch an insurgency against a government which has rejected the law of the land, and overstepped its lawful authority to an extent no other option remains?
Obama is clearly trying to eliminate people capable of individual thought, people with the backbone to directly oppose policies whose intent is more or less obviously to degrade our armed forces, all while creating Billion bullet inventories, tanks, and other assault weaponry for the Committee for Public Safety. Scratch that, the Department of Homeland Security.
Clearly, purges are going on: http://mobile.wnd.com/2013/10/top-generals-obama-is-purging-the-military/#S4bUxH6gDrybhsXA.01
These are Stalin-style purges, where anyone even suspected of disloyalty is being removed.
But here is the thing: this is America, not Russia, and we have breathed the air of freedom now for several centuries, and even the biggest pussy on the block cannot be counted on if Obama launches a full blown coup REGARDLESS of the circumstances, which we can assume will be severe (epidemic, economic crisis, nuke, all originating with Obama’s backers).
Obama–and more importantly Valerie Jarrett–cannot know how our military will react when facing unique circumstances. They cannot assume they will stand idly by while Einsatzgruppen scoop up political opponents and make them disappear. They cannot assume individuals will not attack their own units. They cannot assume all units will obey orders to fire on dissidents.
To my way of thinking, the best, most useful course of action for true patriots in the military is to shut up, not make noise, and outwardly act obedient. There is no point complaining and letting them identify you. You know how this thing works. Don’t post negative comments ANYWHERE. Don’t talk openly with any but your closest friends. Don’t scowl when you salute pictures of Obama (if this is something people do: I know his picture is in most buildings as being at the top of the chain of command). If you have to take lie detectors or loyalty oaths, figure out how to beat them. Play poker.
Wait and see. If we are lucky, we get Rand Paul or Ted Cruz in the White House in 2016, and are able to start dismantling this machinery of oppression.
If we are not lucky–if Jarrett feels too desperate–then you will be positioned in the places where you can do the most good.
The goal is to make the risk so high that it is never taken. Looking in as well as looking out, the goal is deterrence through potential strength.
As part of this process I checked a couple comic books–I will likely never stop calling them that, Peking Peking, Bombay Bombay, and the Koran the Koran–and have been reading one over the last day. It takes me back, because I used to read a lot of them, as well as science fiction and fantasy novels. It is, for any nerds out there, a graphic retelling of the stories of Fafrhd and the Gray Mouser, by Fritz Lieber. I read him, and Fred Saberhagen, and Roger Zelazny, Heinlein (of course), Asimov (of course), and many others.
And in the same spirit that I try to do Movie Yoga, I am watching what reading this thing is doing to me, and what I am seeing is that it is activating what I have proposed be called the Innocent Self. It is the part that feels, that reacts behind the defensive shield even when I don’t realize it.
What comic books do is give voice to this self, which is particularly needed in people who are awkward, socially sensitive, and thus unable to process experience, and especially social experience.
What are kids (and no small number of adults, apparently) doing when they play Dungeons and Dragons? Are they not creating a forum for the interaction of their Innocent Self with others, all while retaining the normal emotional walls outside of the games? Are they not creating the space for the feeling of emotional movement, without the risk? They are saying that part of their self is out there, not in here.
And here is what I wanted to say: Communism is nothing but Dungeons and Dragons for people who want to remain in the social sphere, but not be of it. It deals exclusively with fantasy, with abstraction, with things and processes and histories that are not real. It is a self contained, solipsistic system, which, again, permits the feeling of engagement and connection without the emotional risk of ACTUAL engagement and connection. There is no there, there. I have used that line often, because it is apposite. It is apposite for all narcissists–who are roughly the same people who used to be called ego maniacs.
And here is a vaguely interesting tidbit that may or may not be relevant: the God Fafrhd prays to is Kos. I know Markos Moulitsas got his nickname in the Army, but I wonder if he is not also secretly aware of this. I have always assumed the actual name of the blog was a play on Cause, and certainly I think giving emotionally empty people, whose heads are filled with precisely the sorts of fantasies I am describing here, something daily to obsess about, gripe about, or celebrate is both a primary purpose, and a reason for what success they have seen.
Again, the people there CLEARLY want to entertain fantasies. That is why they have to kick dissidents off: they risk shattering some very congenial, and very NEEDED, pipe dreams. I’m sure there is a fair amount of literal smoke hovering above many of those keyboards, but the rest are simply Dungeons and Dragons players who grew up just a little.
That these doctrines, these fantasies, have caused incalculable suffering is just one more thing it is hard for me to grasp, to truly get. How does insanity propagate? It seems clear it can only propagate in the absence of feedback, of connection with external ideas and influences.
True Liberalism is about ideological diversity. It is about different sorts of people, who believe different things, who behave in different ways, figuring out how to live in peace with one another.
That is not at all the project leftists set themselves. They want conformity.
I have more to say, but need to do things out there.
Actually, I will add one more thing: I think–because I am intelligent, have made a study of the process of organized and effective thinking, and because I have over a long period of time exposed my ideas to critical scrutiny–that my ideas are useful. At the same time, I am not as different emotionally from the denizens of the Daily Cause as I would like. I used to spend 3-4 hours every day debating/arguing on the internet.
Are ideas important? Of course. Everything we see and touch outside the natural world was once an idea.
But I also increasingly believe that this website, both my websites, and all the other voluminous writing I have put out there, or kept to myself, is simply symptom: that of an inability to process and reside in primary experience. In some respects, even when I post “deep” things, go deep places, this is STILL my version of Dungeons and Dragons.
Self evidently, I am working to change that, and frankly having some success.